Under the acquisition, SuccessFactors’ team and technology will be added to SAP’s cloud assets and the combination of SAP and SuccessFactors will establish an advanced end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.

SuccessFactors’ offerings are complementary to SAP’s core HCM offerings as well as SAP’s strong cloud assets: SAP Business ByDesign for the suite cloud market and SAP’s line of business cloud offerings for large enterprises such as SAP Sales on Demand.

The combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM offering, combining strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications.

The SuccessFactors’ applications are designed for businesses of all sizes and offer easily adopted solutions for customers of SAP Business Suite, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business All-in-One, and SAP Business One.

Under the acquistion, SuccessFactors’ cloud expertise and know-how, rapid cloud innovation and proven success running large scale cloud deployments will help SAP customers adopt cloud applications and the SuccessFactors’ mobile applications combined with the mobile expertise of SAP and Sybase will offer customers a powerful business-to-employee mobility portfolio.

In addition, the SuccessFactors enables business insight and execution fits well with SAP’s business analytics platform, promising new levels of real time decision making across the enterprise.

SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott said the cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth and the combination of SuccessFactors’ team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse.

"The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally – managing people and talent. Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud," said McDermott.

SuccessFactors founder and CEO Lars Dalgaard said expanding relationships with SAP’s 176,000 customers with SuccessFactors speed to value, friendly user interface, on mobile devices and the web, and delivering more SAP offerings in the cloud to improve SAP’s business.

"SuccessFactors has proven we have the technology and people to deliver the world’s biggest cloud deployments in terms of users and countries per customer, and also the most applications per customer from the same flexible scalable cloud platform. The business world is ready for enterprise-class cloud applications and together, we can deliver incredible new innovation for global businesses," said Dalgaard.